The AI Buddha - Buddhist Ethics for The Singularity - New Book 2026
- Ralph Quinlan Forde BSc Hons MA
- Mar 27
- 3 min read
This is my forthcoming and third book The AI Buddha which we hope to publish by the end of 2026.
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Superintelligence
Buddhism is perhaps the best religion to assist the world as it now enters an age of artificial intelligence AI.
The whole idea of superintelligence is not a new phenomenon to Buddhism as the Buddha has always been viewed as a superintelligent being.
This superintelligence, however, was characterized by wisdom and compassion. The same cannot be said of all current forms of AI.
The Singularity
Technologists are predicting that in 2029 AI intelligence will be as good as human intelligence.
Most importantly, come the year 2045, AI will surpass human intelligence. This era in our history is being called The Singularity.
By then robots will be doing all, or most of, the manual labour, creating a worldwide existential crisis that could possibly offer an opportunity for spiritual intelligence (SQ) development which in Buddhist terms, is the development of wisdom and compassion contributing to an enlightened society.
For Buddhists a logical system such as computation, which lies at the heart of AI, is incapable of capturing the whole truth – Dharma.
Enlightenment & AI
Enlightenment is beyond an intelligence that follows rules, conforms, and calculates. It is rather about the ending of the emotional roots of unwholesome, harmful states of mind and is as hard to conceive as what The Singularity will actually be.
AI is already scoring your bank loan applications and in certain US states and influencing for how long you will be incarcerated.
So we are already beginning to be affected by AI as its charts its course to be on par with human intelligence.
AI chooses your music streams and also your internet search results. AI can paint, draw, compose, and even speak. The robots are already outsmarting us in facial recognition tests and diagnostics in medicine.
All of this is already leading to information echo chambers where people are fed information based on the likes and dislikes an AI detects from a person’s online activity.
The AI Buddha
In this book Ralph Quinlan Forde BSc Hons MA shows how Buddhist ethics could add benefit by guiding developers to make AI congruent with a peaceful world so that it is developed to help rather than destroy and also to have wisdom.
Let us not forget that you get out of AI what you put in and the future of AI could be a reflection of ourselves.
How we design the AI determines what it is and what it does.
AI As a Reflection of Humanity
A key thing to understand is that AIs may end up being a reflection of who codes them. Unless the developers know, have, and express human values like fairness, empathy, and compassion, dangerous AIs could be produced as a consequence causing wars, famines, environmental disasters, and an erosion of human rights.
Buddhism can help humanity and world leaders to deal with the existential crisis and ethical debate that will be generated as we now journey towards The Singularity.
By 2045 we will be living as post-humans alongside cyborgs, mind clones, and digital humans.
The guidance The AI Buddha will bring to various ethical boards that are being created and scientists developing AI, will be relevant to 520 million Buddhists globally and other world religions too.
As global societies try and integrate the paradigm shifts from AI advances into their democracies.
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